Increase Your Website Traffic with Social Media

July 20, 2015

Having a strong presence on social media is a great way to drive and increase website traffic. Whether you’ve got a blog or commercial site and have monetized it with ads/affiliates, are selling products and services, or are simply just looking to gain a few more followers on your email list. Leveraging social media can help you achieve your goals to increase your website traffic.

To increase website traffic with social media you have to make sure you are promoting your content properly or your audience will look right over your content. When dealing with social media its both a science and an art, and they are always changing the rules so you always have to be adapting yourself. Here are some guaranteed ways to help you begin increasing traffic to your website and it doesn’t take much work!

Increase Your Website Traffic

1. Write Great Content

You can have the fastest website, the prettiest theme, and a million facebook purchased followers. But in the end, content and good content reigns king. Content will only be shared if people enjoy it, it adds value to their lives, or sharing it makes them look good (truth). Writing great content is one of the hardest parts of having your own blog. Find your voice, write for your audience – not for yourself. If one way isn’t working make small changes to see how it affects your audience. If you use images make sure they are great images. I’m talking to you food photographers! Take your time and post quality content and watch your website traffic increase!

2. Add Share Buttons

This seems like a no brainer but there are many times when we venture on a website and we can’t find a button to share! Pick your poison, there are TONS out there free and premium. Just to name a few: Shareaholic, SumoMe, or SocialWarfare. The key is to make your content easy to share, the buttons easily visible, accessible and readily available. Don’t make your visitors search for your share buttons. Place them at the end of your post.

If you build it, they will tweet it. Again, your customers want easy and if you setup a tweet already ready for them, they’re be a lot more likely to tweet for you. Before we added a click-to-tweet button on our blogs we had very little tweet action. Adding a tweet button with a pre-setup tweet saves your customers time and it’s so easy! Free promotion for you, they get to share a great article they found and look good to their friends. It’s a win-win and will increase your website traffic.

Ever see a post on Facebook and it’s not centered or it’s cropped weird? We see it all the time and we are guilty of it as well! Make sure you are optimizing your images for social media. This means Twitter, Facebook, G+, and Pinterest. Just as a reminder. Pinterest images are 736 wide x 1200 high and Facebook are 1200 wide x 630 high. If you’re not a photoshop guru, use Canva to set up your images. Your social media shared content will get a lot more attention when your customers know what your image is! A picture says a thousand words.

5. Add an Open Graph Plugin

Facebook introduced the Open Graph Protocol to play nice with other websites. There are quite a few plugins out there that optimize for Open Graph. We’ve fund that Facebook Open Graph, Google+ and Twitter Card Tags has the least amount of bugs and issues. Yoast has this feature built in but it never seems to work properly.

6. Share your Posts (Group Boards and Groups)

If you’ve just started out and don’t have many fans or followers on your own personal page, then share your posts! Join relevant groups on Facebook and group boards on Pinterest then start contributing your content to those groups once or twice a day. This will help get your site and name out there and with that will drive further website traffic.

Bonus!

7. Social Proof

What is social proof? It’s proof that your content is worth sharing. How is this done? By displaying the number of shares a post gets, by sharing reviews from customers of your products, the number of pins an image gets, how many people are fans/followers you have on Faebook, Twitter, Instragram, and Pinterest. This shows others that come to your site that people are engaged with you and are taking interest in your content. When you do this, others are more likely to engage as well. Often times we don’t show our share numbers, likes, or reviews. I encourage you to do so!

Hey Melanie – Thanks for commenting! This is one of those questions that doesn’t have a specific answer simply because everyone’s social media is different. For instance with FB you have to take into account how big your list is and further more your user engagement. You could have a million users with low user engagement. Someone in this kind of situation will want to shed the fat, get their engagement up which will get their reach up. Facebook has stated that average post reach is between something like 5% and 40% but in reality it’s only about 2%. If you have a million users and 2% reach you could post every hour and depending on your user engagement, your users may see your post once, or not at all! Low user engagement to me is like shouting into a void! That’s why it’s always great to submit your blog posts multiple times on social media in different variations. Your social media will take on a life of its own and what works for one person may not work for others.

We typically schedule between 5-8 times a day on social media using hootsuite (fb, twitter, g+). We send additional updates to twitter a few more times throughout a day but it’s random. For Pinterest we use tailwind and ahalogy and schedule about 3 times a day. Instagram is whenever we have a good picture to share so it’s completely random and we link our instagram to our facebook to share! :).

As you can see there is no formula or special secret time to share. We just try to share great content for our followers to read!

I started blogging full time, creating a job out of it this summer. It’s a ton of work, getting noticed. Social Media is everything! It’s seriously a full time job on it’s own. No wonder some companies hire it out. Maybe I should hire my daughter to do it for me!

Great tips. I would love to find a way to have more engagement via social media. I’m still working on that and using some of the tips you mentioned. I’m sure I need to do more. Some days it’s like banging my head against the wall though. Thanks for linking up on Snickerdoodle Sunday.